“I explained it to her in these terms: you are wasting time, your brother is not going to waste any time doing this. Every day of his life he will put a shirt on, he’s out the door and he doesn’t give a shit if you waste an hour and a half doing your makeup.”

I was quite disappointed by the simplistic, binary gender images that were invoked here. What kind of image of gender roles is Zadie Smith transferring on to her daughter? It may very well be that Ms Smith’s son doesn’t give a shit and just throughs on any shirt he can find. These days, we know there is more to gender than boys want to play outside and girls want to look pretty. But it particularly startled me that a woman like Zadie Smith, who writes to elaborately and with a great eye for subtle details about race and gender issues, falls for the binary gender construction when it comes to her own family. I can’t believe that she reinforces the constructions through her daughter.

But, as I said, I read the article a few days ago, I was disappointed and a bit shocked – and then I moved on. Only today did I get aware, that I was not the only Personen disagreement with Zadie Smith’s statement. I read about the reactions here. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to be concerned with the conservative gender role of boys do that and girls do this, but took offense with the fact that Zadie Smith was too beautiful to be concerned with makeup and therefore had no right to speak about the issue. Seriously? That is your feminist rebuke?

Maya Angelou was already in her 40ies, too, when she wrote her first book. It was an autobiography. She has written mostly autobiography. She didn’t come from an intellectual background at all. For all I could find out, she finished high school and that’s it. From then on she worked in all kinds of professions and lived in many different places all over America. A point was made that even though she didn’t have a university degree, she was later on appointed as a professor of English.

I, personally, had not heard of her until her death. It may be my fault, but she wasn’t really present in the book market in Germany or any other country I lived in around Europe. This is reflected in the lack of translations of her work into German. As far as I know, only her most famous first book I know why the caged bird sings has been translated into German.

Besides my interest in the birth of the writer or the transformation of an ordinary person into an artist, I am also quite interested in the writing habits of authors. Many readers will have heard of the book about the daily rituals of famous intellectuals. I don’t know, what pattern the choice of the people was based on. Maybe none. I am particularly interested in what writing habits there are. How writers make time for writing and how much they write or how much of their time they spend actually writing. I personally find writing a draining and exhausting task, so I cannot imagine any writer to follow a “normal” 8-hour workday routine.

In any case… Maya Angelou described her writing habit in an interview with the Paris review. She says that she leaves the house around six and starts her day’s work at around 6.30am. She works until 12.30 or 1.30pm and then goes home, takes a shower and “plays sane”. That means she goes shopping and runs errands of all sort. In the afternoon she looks at the writing has done in the morning and starts editing, dismissing etc. That’s 6 to 7 hours of writing a day. Straight up writing. Not counting in the editing in the afternoon.

When I was little I wrote multiple novels. That is, I started writing multiple novels. None of them were ever finished. The longest piece was about 20 pages (handwritten) and I was very proud of it. Only secretly obviously, because I never showed my work to anyone. I was too afraid and shy. I thought I was born to be a great writer, but I didn’t want anybody to know – yet. So, I never talked to anybody about my novels. Had I done that, I might have come out of that lofty cloud of being a oh so special writer a lot earlier.

Today, as I work as a teacher, I talk to many children on a daily basis. And to my surprise a lot of them tell me that they have written stories and novels already. I mean, not hundreds, but a few. Many more than I would have ever expected, especially when I was a child myself. And they talk about it openly. I would have never done anything like that. The thought of anybody knowing about my secret scared the shit out of me. These brave kids. They probably have a far greater chance of ever making it to writers heaven than I had.